Homicide

"Brilliant and original in very many ways, with nice touches of wit. I can think of no book on homicide from which I've learned more: the biggest, longest, and most careful longitudinal study ever, in the world's most important city."--Roger Lane, author of "Murder in America

"Eric Monkkonen is one of the world's leading crime historians. With characteristic diligence, he has gone back 200 years to capture the records on all homicides in New York City, consistently the nation's big city, and so a good model for urban homicide more generally. He explores in considerable detail the changing dimensions of demography, relationships, situations, and weaponry, thereby providing important insights that would not emerge from the more typical short-term analysis."--Alfred Blumstein, coeditor of "The Crime Drop in America

"The topic is obviously important, the research remarkable, the analysis very interesting, and the writing engaging. Despite the grim subject, this book is fun to read."--Ken Pomeranz, author of,"The Great Divergence

After Homicide describes the collective responses of bereaved people to the aftermath of violent death, a subject not dealt with in any detail in the literature that is currently available. The book concentrates particularly on the birth, development and organization of the self help and campaigning groups that emerged in the last decade. The author examines these as attempts to give institutional expression to interpretations of grief, and shows us that these attemps, in their turn, are implicated in a potent phenomenology of mourning. In addition, the author had special access to a number of groups and uses the infomation that he gathered through this access to discuss the practical and political importance of the work of these groups, and their affects on policing, the media and the law.

While print and broadcast media are filled every day with homicide accounts, the general public seems most disturbed by crimes attributed to individuals who otherwise seem "normal." Murders by those perceived to be historically non-violent often appear to erupt with no warning whatsoever. Moffatt argues that certain key predictors of a predisposition to violence are usually present. Citing case studies of workplace, school, and domestic homicides, he debunks the myth that these murders happen "out of the blue." He also includes valuable information on predicting and preventing future tragedies.

New Arenas for Violence examines the history, nature, and causal factors of occupational homicide--murder in the workplace--with a view to the development of a comprehensive understanding of the issue and the introduction of prevention measures designed to establish a safer work environment for the American worker. Through the analysis of a number of actual incidents of homicide, the author constructs a new framework for understanding occupational homicide and its perpetrators. Kelleher develops a new method of categorizing and evaluating crimes of this sort and offers an invaluable profile of the potentially violent worker or client. The book concludes with a compendium of prevention methodologies that are both practical and applicable to a wide variety of workplace environments.

More suspenseful than a detective thriller, Profiles in Murder packs a punch that few novels deliver -- and this book is all true.t FBI legend Russ Vorpagel, along with Robert Ressler, helped put the FBI Behavioral Science Profiling Unit on the map, as immortalized in The Silence of the Lambs.

Here in this thrilling book, he reveals the inside story on how psychological profiling and old-fashioned detective work helped crack cases of serial killings, sex crimes, celebrity murders, hostage taking, terrorist crimes, and police cover-ups. Vorpagel -- the hard-boiled detective, yet disarmingly engaging guide -- takes us back in time to the actual scenes of the crime. His infectious enthusiasm not only inspires us to adopt his brilliant detective mindset and sleight of hand logic, but draws us in to experience the unbridled euphoria of solving the crime. This master detective skillfully transports us to the dramatic scenes leading up to each of these grisly crimes, subtly dropping clues, as he finetunes our own sense of detective logic.

This is a reprint of a book first published by Little, Brown in 1978. George Fletcher is working on a new edition, which will be published by Oxford in three volumes, the first of which is scheduled to appear in January of 2001. Rethinking Criminal Law is still perhaps the most influential and often cited theoretical work on American criminal law. This reprint will keep this classic work available until the new edition can be published.